AI Slop Is Making the Internet Fake-Happy
A new study examines the impact of the rise of AI-generated websites on the internet—and found some surprising results.
To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem . The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence.
A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the internet fake-happy.
The research team tried four different approaches to AI detection before settling on tools from Pangram Labs after it delivered the most consistent results. (Though the team found it performed well on its tests, it is worth noting that all artificial intelligence detection tools are imperfect .) To compile a representative sample of websites, it tapped the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine , which collects snapshots of webpages. In addition to quantifying how many sites created between 2022 and 2025 lean on AI-generated writing, the study also tested six different theories about the characteristics of slop.
The test that looked into artificial cheerfulness examined how AI affected the tone of online writing. Using sentiment analysis, which classifies words as positive, neutral, or negative, it found that “the average positive sentiment score of AI-generated or AI-assisted was 107 percent higher than that of non-AI websites.” The researchers see this spike in artificial happiness as a "symptom" of the “sycophantic and overoptimistic nature of existing LLMs.” In this way, AI writing tools’ tendency to suck up to their human users has a spillover effect, making the overall tenor of online writing more saccharine.
Another test investigated whether the increase in AI-generated writing shrinks “the range of unique ideas and diverse viewpoints” on offer. The researchers found that AI did make the internet less ideologically diverse, with AI websites scoring roughly 33 percent higher on testing for “semantic similarity” than human-made websites.
While those two tests validated the researchers’ assumptions about AI, others did not. Four theories that the researchers tested were not confirmed. Notably, they had suspected that AI would lead to a rise in misinformation, but their analysis of the evidence did not support the hypothesis. They had also guessed that AI writing wouldn’t link out to external sources, and that it would be stylistically more generic than human writing. Confounding expectations, neither of those theories were supported by the evidence, either.
